Sorting Through All the Laughs Joan Rivers Left Behind

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Joan Rivers filled boxes and boxes with scripts, letters and other material connected to her long career. Above, a cabinet containing papers tied to her appearances on numerous TV shows.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

The drawers are jammed with jokes typed on 4-by-6-inch cards — 52 drawers, stacked waist-high, like a card catalog of a certain comedian’s life’s work, a library of laughs.

It turns out that Joan Rivers — the sassy motormouth who became known for the question “Can we talk?” — could just as easily have asked, “Can we squirrel away?” She filled those file drawers, and that was not all.

She also saved scripts from monologues when she was the permanent guest host on the “Tonight Show.” She invented insults about everything and everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Renee Zellweger. And she saved letters from famous people. Unlikely as it probably seems now, she had heard from everyone, from Fred Rogers of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” to Phyllis Diller, another unforgettable personality who was often credited with helping to open the way for female comedians like Ms. Rivers.

She saved it all. She had boxes and boxes in warehouses on both coasts that were culled for the new book “Joan Rivers Confidential.” It is 335 pages long but contains only the tiniest fraction of what she amassed on her journey along the celebrity food chain, first as she did standup comedy and later as she reinvented herself on QVC and “Fashion Police.” In between, there were the years on the “Tonight Show” and her own late-night program on Fox, a short-lived gig that Johnny Carson never forgave her for.

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Scott Currie, who worked with Melissa Rivers on a book about her mother, Joan Rivers, at the comedian’s former Manhattan office. Many of her papers are stored there.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Perhaps the volume of material that had to be gone through explains the book’s 17-word subtitle: “The unseen scrapbooks, joke cards, personal files and photos of a very funny woman who kept everything.”

The exploration of all those items was done by her daughter Melissa and by Scott Currie, a publicist whose first job was as an associate producer on Joan Rivers’s talk show in the early 1990s. He bonded with her — “It was love at first sight,” Melissa Rivers said of her mother and Mr. Currie. “They became incredibly, incredibly close on many levels. She really became a mother figure and he really became a son-slash-confidant-slash-good friend.”

And, after her death in 2014, he became almost overwhelmed by what she had stored away over the years. “No one really knew the extent of this — I never discussed it with her,” Mr. Currie said.

This prompted a question: What word would Melissa Rivers use to describe what her mother did, saving all that stuff.

“Large storage bills,” she said. “It became more about archiving. That’s the word I’m looking for. Archiving.” She added that “in hindsight,” sorting through the material was cathartic. “In the process, hell, no,” she said.

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Ms. Rivers had an endless supply of jokes, and she doesn’t seem to have thrown any of them away.CreditHiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Mr. Currie approached choosing what to include in “Joan Rivers Confidential” like a sympathetic curator. It was, he said, a job he was suited for: As a teenager, he retreated to the basement and stayed up late to watch Joan Rivers on the “Tonight Show.”

“I’d love to say that she was forward-thinking in saving the best,” he said, “but she saved everything. Would you like to see her fur-cleaning bill from 1969?” He reached into a file drawer and pulled it out. It was from Bergdorf Goodman: $20 for cleaning her ranch mink coat, $7.50 for cleaning her ranch mink hat.

Like the jokes on the file cards, the bill was typed.

Here it is probably necessary to explain that lots of things were once typed — on machines called typewriters — during a period of human history after stone tablets and before laptops and cellphones. It is probably also necessary to explain that reference to a card catalog in the first paragraph. A card catalog was an inventory of what was in a library before all the holdings were listed, and maybe available, online.

One challenge for Mr. Currie was that not everything Ms. Rivers saved could be read. “You’d open one box and it was either ‘wow’ or ‘oh, pillows.’”

But Ms. Rivers did do some arranging. She arranged the 52 drawers alphabetically by subject, from “Annoying habits” to “Zoo.” In the T’s, one drawer starts with “Elizabeth Taylor” and goes as far as “teenagers.” The next drawer picks up with “teeth” and runs to “trains.” A drawer in the G’s begins with “growing older” and ends with “guns.” It takes the next drawer to hold all the cards filed under “guys I dated.” Inevitably — this was Joan Rivers, after all — there are categories with the word “sex,” including “My sex life,” “No sex life,” “No sex appeal.”

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Melissa Rivers with her mother at the Academy Awards in 2007.CreditAdam Larkey/ABC

She eventually moved to email, though Mr. Currie said she often typed the whole messages in the subject line. “I think it was a speed thing,” Mr. Currie said. “She hated to move the mouse around.”

Mr. Currie had helped clean out her apartment after her death. “I knew there was a basement,” he said. “Joan had shown me the basement. It was stacked to the ceiling with Louis Vuitton luggage and videotapes. There was more in L.A., in a storage facility.” There he and Melissa Rivers discovered scrapbooks with clippings of newspaper articles about Joan Rivers. In all, there were 56 scrapbooks.

“Obviously, in the beginning when you’re first starting out, you keep everything,” Melissa Rivers said. “I think it just became a habit.”

Some boxes turned out to be time capsules that might not have made the cut if Mr. Currie had been the only one deciding. There was material on “That Show,” a 1960s morning talk program, Joan Rivers’s first as a host. “I wasn’t going to include ‘That Show,’” Mr. Currie said, but Melissa Rivers was persuasive. “She said ‘That Show’ was huge” as a milestone in Joan Rivers’s career.

Also, the furniture on the set came out of Ms. Rivers’s apartment — a white cabinet and chairs.

Melissa Rivers said she was struck by “how much of a social commentator my mother was, yet she would never have said, ‘I do social commentary.’ But she stayed so in the moment. It’s a look back at what people were talking about, what sacred cows she was tipping over and how that changed with every decade. It’s almost a history of pop culture.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Sorting a Comic’s Library of Laughs (and Letters and Bills and …). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe